The Case of the Speluncean Explorers - Essay Example

This case finds us in a great quandary and it is no less than a tragedy that these men have found themselves for the second time in a short amount of time again fighting and hoping to stay alive. The members of the Speluncean Society come before this Court with blood in their hands but with the same light of hope that glimmered in their eyes when they were freed after weeks of gruesome entrapment inside a dark and inauspicious cave that encapsulated their subsistence. Devoid of any further source of food or sustenance, the men faced the ultimate decision of resorting to an act gravely disdained by any civilized society. The joyful day of the men’s freedom simultaneously gave rise to the moment of astonishment when the men who went in came out one person short.

Sadly and regrettably, Roger Whetmore was not one of the lucky survivors. Whitmore has fallen victim to his device. He, unfortunately, suffered the fateful consequence of what he had himself proposed. Though he became reluctant at the last minute, his idea had already been fuelled and intensified by the burning will of a band of men with lost hope of survival and dying of hunger (Fuller, n.p.). It was a point of no return and it was a circumstance no God-fearing individual would wish for for his family, his friends, or even his enemies.

The law exists for many reasons and this Court exists in concurrence with the application therewith. The Court serves as an instrument toward the realization of the implementation of justice for all of the people in this great nation. Justice must be affixed with rationality, inoculated with the integration of moral sense and ultimately of consciousness (Tebbit, p.6), and must thus be acted upon by those duty-bound to render it. This Court is guided not by whims or caprices but by the letter of the law.

The decision as rendered for review is by its very disposition a resonation of the nobility that it is thus accorded. But this Court is not solely devoted to the preservation of equity but to the accomplishment of justice. It is by this very reason that it is but a matter of justice that we cannot pass upon the conviction of the members of the Speluncean Society and hope for the best in the presumption that another branch of this gracious nation would act so accordingly to the whisper of their conscience and to the threshold of what is right.

To do so would be too devoid of this honorable institution of its tradition of courage to do what it has maintained throughout these years. The situation that the men have found themselves in is one of extraordinary predicament that to describe them in such a manner as to now subject them to what seems to be fatal criticism that shall cost them their life. It is by no means that these men are immoral and wanting of proper decent character that to penalize them would yield such a conclusion. They are contributing members of society who happened to be running short on luck one fateful day.

Much worse, their death would not serve as a grave example and a deterrent that no other man shall emulate what they have done. For what it is worth, it is but a simple logical contemplation that these things are outright absurd in context. 

The men did not intend to kill Whetmore for the sole purpose of ending his life for personal ulterior motives. The sole reason for their act was survival. They exercised the primitive instinct innate in every human being to strive to keep alive by every means possible. The tragedy is not on the death of Roger Whetmore alone but on the prospect of seeing these men die again before us after sacrificing what part of their humanity they have already lost while imprisoned in the cave.